


first thing that you want (last you'll ever need)

by meansgirl



Series: Zombie Apocalypse AU [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: queerlygen, Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-05
Updated: 2010-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:19:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meansgirl/pseuds/meansgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura Cadman at the end of the world</p>
            </blockquote>





	first thing that you want (last you'll ever need)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for queerlygen's three weeks for dreamwidth Zombie Apocalypse challenge.

Teyla could meditate in the pool of sun that collected in the main atrium of the mall for hours at a time. She could sit so still that sometimes the rest of them would start to worry and someone would have to go stick a finger under her nose and make sure she was still breathing. Teyla was graceful and flexible, agile and fluid. She would take Elizabeth through poses, standing behind her to adjust her hips, leaning her weight forward and murmuring, “Now push. Good.”

Laura watched this every other day, barring a breech of the barricades by walking undead. Teyla was gentle and soft-spoken during her yoga sessions. She was soothing when one of them finally had enough of the whole hunted by zombies thing, that sweet and low voice right in their ears, a delicate hand on a shoulder squeezing and nudging. “Come, let’s make you a cup of tea.”

Teyla could probably, Laura is ninety-nine percent sure, have killed any one of them with her pinky finger. Everything in Teyla that made her their resident sun goddess could turn sharp and calculated in a second, all of the control she could exert over her own body bursting out and straight at you, that just-short-of-creepy intuition going manipulative until before you knew it, you were on the ground and getting up was a distant possibility you could address once you got feeling back in your limbs.

Laura used to wonder, and sometimes still does, if zombies feel surprise. If they register people as anything other than three square meals. If Teyla’s fist knocking them over, her arms bringing an axe down on their heads, ever made them think “Oh, shit.” the way Laura sometimes did when Teyla’s face turned up, dirty, gore-spattered and oh so _very_ calm. Beautiful.

Poor Ronon was the first to suggest sparring, and everyone had been more than a little surprised when Teyla said, “That is a very good idea. I will spar with you.” and toed off her shoes. Laura had to admit that even though they had just met, and there was an army of undead literally banging down the door, the picture Teyla made when she swept Ronon’s legs out from under him and knelt on his chest to keep him down sent all the right impulses straight to the part of Laura’s brain which controlled ideas like “If I had six hours, a locked room and a trunk full of fun things made out of leather, it would be _so on_.”

Laura would spar with Teyla two or three times a week in the sporting goods store. Sometimes one of the others would sit and watch but the days without an audience were better. One, Lorne was a bitch and made fun of her every time Teyla kicked her ass. Two, no other people meant an undistracted Teyla, who didn’t play to an audience like Lorne or Ronon, but was twice as intense without the distraction of spectators. Teyla always won either way.

Despite the fact that apparently everyone was sleeping with everyone just to feel alive, it was never on with Teyla, who Laura figured was her only option for some sweaty naked relief--and a long-shot at that. 

Laura had thought maybe Teyla had ascended above a base need like sex through the power of stretching and meditation, or maybe she’d lost someone and couldn’t bring herself to touch anyone else. Either way, Laura remained celibate while the soldiers and scientists screwed like rabbits and Carson unsubtly eye-fucked Elizabeth across the food court, and she assumed Teyla did too.

Then Laura had walked in on Teyla and Ronon during a check of the mall’s lower level. 

It was hot, actually, and she _had_ watched, just for a minute. But it was also _unfair_, and for the rest of the day Laura couldn’t stand to watch Lorne and Radek and their stupid casual touches, or Sheppard and McKay and their emotionally stunted but somehow unintentionally adorable bullshit. She couldn’t talk to Elizabeth, who Laura sort of thought was an ice queen, or Carson because he kind of got on her nerves.

She was trapped in a mall at the end of the world with a bunch of maladjusted people who all wanted to sleep with each other, and she was stuck watching it all happen and trying not to die. Horror movies had failed to prepare her for this.

Laura had gone and beat the hell out of Lorne in a sparring match but was just pissed that she won, so she gave in and locked herself away in a department store fitting room. She came on her knees, her forehead pressed against a full length mirror, her hand shoved down the front of her jeans, with no one’s name on her lips. 

After that, nothing happened. They kept surviving best they could, until they couldn’t. Laura started figuring out ways to build bombs out of what she could scavenge, which she let take up her free time until make-shift explosives became pointless and they had to keep moving. 

At the end of a sparring match, Teyla would look down at Laura, either straddling her torso or keeping her down with an improvised practice weapon, and would ask: 

“Enough?”

*

Laura blinks sweat out of her eyes and looks up into the sky. It’s cloudy but the air is muggy and she’s surrounded by gnats and mosquitos. 

It wouldn’t surprise her if even the bugs know she’s running on fumes and will make good food sooner or later.

Her leg throbs where her last un-shredded t-shirt is tied around a week-old wound from a bad encounter with the rotted floor of an abandoned church. Her hands are stiff. The calluses from climbing her way out from under the debris and out of the church basement are ripping open now, and the skin underneath is raw. She has no idea how long she’s been sitting here. She’s not sure where _here_ is.

She looks around. The chopped-down corn stalks under her legs poke old bruises and Laura remembers. 

“Right,” she tells herself, “Ohio.”

She’s been making her way through the same corn field for days. There’s a farmhouse somewhere up ahead, unless she’s gotten really turned around, in which case she has no idea where the house is and is well and truly fucked. 

She struggles to her feet, using a branch she found by the side of the dirt road two days ago as a makeshift cane. Her other hand searches for the machete that’s been her only friend for a long time. Christ, her leg hurts. She’s been trying to stretch it, slowly, the way Teyla taught them, for days. There are still splinter fragments in there, she knows, and every time she extends the leg it feels like a thousand vicious stabs to the thigh.

“This,” Laura mutters, “sucks.”

It takes her another day and a half of chopping through dead corn to get to the farm house, which boasts a wide-open door, four dead human bodies in the basement and a scattering of dried-out undead lying in a good mile radius around the place. Limping around the perimeter after her initial check of the inside, Laura gives the head of an inanimate zombie a nice kick with her good leg.

“Dead brains not as good as live ones, huh?” She asks it, then whacks it with her walking stick just because it feels good. 

On the second floor of the house, she lies down on a twin bed covered with plaid sheets and a soft quilt and closes her eyes. She opens them who knows how many hours later when she feels pressure on her chest, someone pushing down hard enough to pin her but not hard enough to hurt or really block her breathing.

“Teyla.”

The face looking down at her isn’t real. Teyla, like everyone else, is gone, or missing, or dead, or just surviving somewhere else--Laura doesn’t know, she just knows Teyla can’t be here, so she can’t be real.

Teyla quirks an eyebrow and asks her, “Enough?”

When Laura jerks awake in what she’s pretty sure was once a teenaged boy’s bedroom, she’s the only one there. Her leg is just as doomed as it was when she dozed off, but her hands feel a little better. She wonders if there’s a well somewhere on the property; maybe she can get cleaned up. It’ll be the first time in weeks, and maybe a good washing is all she needs to keep going. 

She gets herself up, and it hurts, but she does it because it’s time to move again.

Teyla’s not there, because Teyla can’t be there, but Laura answers her question anyway.

“No.”


End file.
